The field of this invention relates to electronic brain monitoring techniques.
We spend a significant amount of time and money trying to determine “who am I?”, “what do I want to be?” and “what am I naturally good at.” One of the basic questions to a child or young adult is “What do you want to be when you grow up?” Their initial response may reflect something exciting as a fireman, policeman, or sports star. Others may take a more human approach of being a nurse, doctor, or veterinarian. Many times, the basis for their decision is on something they saw on TV, internet or heard from their peers. Others are influenced by their parents' wishes or a school teacher's guidance. This “who do I want to be?” question takes a more serious course when a young high school student starts to elect specialized courses to focus on college. A high school student's college selection decisions will have significant impact on the rest of his/her life. Once in college, the average student changes their major more than twice. People will normally be happy doing things that come easy to them. One risk is that people don't find out what they want to do until years down the road.
Employers spend a lot of time and money searching for young college graduates to train to become professionals. Yet a large number of personnel quit for something else after years of investment. A classic example is the U.S. military, who spend billions of dollars to attract skilled individuals. The military recruits for basic and advanced training and then invests significantly more money in specialized training for military gunners, drivers, pilots, computer operations, weapon specialists, etc. Finding personnel to train for highly specialized positions such as fighter pilots, special operations personnel, and specialized physicians is an especially expensive and time consuming process.
Many persons may have strong skills yet are not aware because they may not have been exposed the areas where they have strength. An example would be a young adult that never played an instrument but has an inherent ability to do well in music if exposed. The problem is how to identify hidden skills in a person that has the ability to be great in a particular profession but is not aware of this since he was never exposed to the profession.
Administration of standardized tests such as the Myers-Briggs or similar tests measuring knowledge, personality traits, or cognitive ability requires a substantial amount of time for the candidate to read or listen to questions and record responses on paper or electronic media. Such tests can be compromised by the self-reporting biases of the candidate being tested. The candidate has an opportunity to consider the question and shape a response suited to how the candidate wishes to be perceived rather than providing the strictly objective response.
Tests based on written or spoken stimuli can be limited in their ability to probe the full spectrum of the psyche of the candidate. Conventional tests can also limit the responses to stimuli to very simplistic binary answers or multiple choice answers recorded by pencil, paper, or electronic means. Interpretation of test results requires subjective assessments of skilled personnel. Consequently, conventional testing to predict the suitability of persons to perform particular functions has often not proven to be reliable due to the subjective nature of the assessment.
Conventional personality type indicators classify persons in a relative small number of specific categories. For example Myers-Briggs classifies a person in 1 of 16 categories. Thus conventional personality type indicators may not have the fidelity necessary to capture traits that are indicative of certain subgroups of the human population, such as certain high performing personnel.